Comment by munificent

One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes:

1. How much should the language surprise you?

2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you?

              surprising
                   ^
                   |
                   |
                   |
    delight <------+------> horrify
                   |
                   |
                   |
                   v
              unsurprising

Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly assume that all well-behaved languages belong on the bottom left: the language should rarely suprise you but in the rare case it does, hopefully it's a delight.

Raku seems to overtly aim for the mostly-unoccupied top left. It's like the designers and users (two sets with apparently very large overlap) all think, "Yes, it's weird. Isn't that grand!"